How Much Should You Walk a Day to Lose Weight?

Reviewed By: Pramod Kerkar, MD, FFARCSI

One of the famous quotes from Hippocrates tells, "Walking is man's best medicine."We all know how beneficial walking can be for our body, mind and our health in general. One of the best benefits from walking is weight loss. There are many people all around the world who are in to walking and in a mission of reducing some good weight. After all everyone dreams and expects a healthy and fit body! If you are one of those who love to walk everyday and want to reduce weight then it is very sure you must be wondering about the amount of walking you need in a day to get the effective results in weight loss. So, in this article we will talk exactly about, how much should you walk a day to lose weight. Hope you would find this pretty interesting and informative.

How Walking Helps in Weight Loss?

"Walking is a cheap, fun, safe and acceptable exercise." Walking is considered as one of the safest forms of exercise known to man. It is known to be effective in losing weight. Depending on how often you walk, how much you walk in a day or per week; you can manage losing your weight.

Before we talk about how much should you walk a day to lose weight, let us know about how you can lose weight by walking? Walking actually helps you in losing weight by burning your calories. The numbers of calories you burn while walking is dependent on how much you walk and at what pace you walk every day. It is believed that if you walk at a common pace of 4 miles in an hour you can roughly burn 400 calories every hour. One can lose about 20 pounds of weight in less than 5 months only by walking.

How Much Should You Walk a Day to Lose Weight?

Now, let us straight away come to our topic of interest, i.e. how much walk a day is needed to lose weight. We will talk about this here in this section. We will study this under some categories we have listed below.

How many steps you need to walk a day to lose weight?

How many miles you need to walk a day to lose weight?

How far can you walk a day to lose weight?

How long you should walk a day to lose weight?

How often should you walk a day to lose weight?

How Many Steps You Need to Walk to Lose Weight?

In order to lose weight, any average person requires walking about 2,000 steps in the average one mile. It is known that one mile could burn about 100 calories. Accordingly one can calculate the weight loss based on his or her steps on a daily routine while walking.

1 mile= 2000 steps that burns 100 calories

1 pound= 3500 calories

1 pound of weight loss in a week= 500 calories to be burned in a day

That makes, in order to lose 1 pound of weight per week one needs to walk 10,000 steps per day.

Now, are you worried taking so many steps in a day? Are you short of time to go for a walk that holds 10,000 steps? Well! We can provide you with some simple ideas to solve your issue here.

Park your car at a distance from your destination and take an extra walk.

Start off for office early, walk a distance from home and then take the bus or taxi.

Climb the stairs instead of using lift.

Walk your children to their school.

So, even if it is a busy day, you can try these out at some point or the other. This way you get the everyday benefits of walking your steps to burn calories and lose weight. You can use a pedometer to track your progress in weight loss by walking every day.

How Many Miles You Need to Walk a Day to Lose Weight?

It is essential for you to find out your starting point in terms of your activity, the number of calories you are burning each day via walking and the distance you are covering in a day on an average. You can find out how many miles you need to walk in a day to lose your weight.

For example, if you are willing to lose 2 pound of your weight in a week; you need to burn 7000 calories in a week or 1000 calories a day. For this, you need to take 20000 steps each day and that makes 10 miles in a day.

Again, weight loss also depends on your diet consumed. You need to go for appropriate diet change along with walking some extra miles to lose weight. Moreover it is also essential for you to go for some strength training exercises along with walking for best results.

It is always recommended to consult an expert about the diet and exercises to lose weight.

How Long You Need to Walk a Day to Lose Weight?

Now, let us come down to the time spent in walking per day to lose weight. Before you go for walking, one thing must be essential and that is, you need to consult with your physician so as to assure you are healthy enough to participate in this weight loss activity of walking each day.

It is known that walking for 30 minutes or more on a continuous basis is best for burning calories. You must walk for 30 minutes for most of the days in a week to get your desired results in weight loss.

However, if you are a beginner in walking, you must start walking 3-4 days a week for 15-20 minutes each day and then gradually increase the time and frequency to 30 minutes or more per day for 5-7 days a week.

How Far Can You Walk a Day to Lose Weight?

If you are worrying to know how far you can walk a day then we must tell you that if you are walking at a brisk pace then you can cover about 1-5 miles to 2 miles or 2-5 kms to 3.3 kms in 30 minutes of your walk each day.

How Often Should One Walk to Lose Weight?

In order to lose weight via walking; it is recommended that you walk almost every day of the week. If not all the seven days, you must at least walk 5 days in a week. Apart from this, it is also essential for you to note not to skip more than one day in a row. As it is well known, that consistency is good for burning calories and for improving body's metabolism.

It must be mentioned that your total time spent in walking per week must be around 5- 10 hours. You can go for some strength training exercises during the non-walking days.

Some Weight Loss Walking Workout Tips:

Here below are some tips on weight loss walking workout.

It is recommended that walking for 30-60 minutes in a day at 50% to 70% of your maximum heart rate is beneficial for weight loss.

Begin walking at an easy pace for about 5 minutes.

Stop and go for some stretches and flexibility exercises.

Go for a brisk walk for 30 minutes.

Cool down and have 5 minutes of walking at a slower pace.

Then, finally finish your walking with some gentle stretches

Conclusion:

With all these you must be having a bit more of your idea on how much should you walk a day to lose weight. And now that you are known to your answers why not stop wondering and start taking your steps towards weight loss?